In 1941, Jorge Luis Borge wrote The Library of Babel, a story which described an almost infinite library containing every possible combination of letters in a vast collection of 410-page books.
Jonathon Basile has spent six months learning how to make a virtual version that can generate every possible page of 3,200 characters:
The Library currently allows users to choose from about 104677 potential books. The site also features a search tool, which allows users to retrieve the location in the library of any known page of text. Any individual page of Hamlet or the Bible can be found in the library, but the possibility of finding any other page from the same work in the same volume is vanishingly small.
While the library contains every possible page, it does not yet hold every possible combination of those pages. If this restriction were lifted, Basile explains on the site, the library would house "every book that ever has been written, and every book that ever could be – including every play, every song, every scientific paper, every legal decision, every constitution, every piece of scripture, and so on".
Basile evokes the comprehensive nature of the library's "blind volumes", saying: "To take a recent example, the confidential documents leaked by Edward Snowden... will be there somewhere. It's only a matter of knowing where to look for them."
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @05:12AM
By the same token, the library would also contain, say, documents purporting to be from Edward Snowden that say something other than what he said. You'd also have infinitely many corrupt copies of the Bible that say everything and anything. And every scientific paper, including every possible falsified variation. And many, many more that simply contain nonsense. It would be like trying to verify whether the decryption of a one-time pad is actually true or not.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday May 07 2015, @03:03PM
I suggest reading the Borges [wikipedia.org]. His work seems to be the only sub-topic of the story that has gone without comment in our Soylent thread.
He's amazing and odd. To the unfamiliar I would describe him as being a bit like Lovecraft without monsters, or Philip K Dick without technologies. Much of this is meta-fiction: nested stories about stories - implying recursions and variations. I can hardly imagine that a movie like pi was conceived, without a familiarity of the later Borges stories.
I suggest at least Labyrinths [wikipedia.org] as a collection for Soylentils. It contains the marvelous Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius [wikipedia.org], among others. A topical summary of the stories contained is available here, [wsu.edu] but doesn't really do justice and may be "spoilers", if such are possible.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @05:28AM
I don't see any page in a script other than latin.
So much for "any known page of text".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @07:42AM
What next to do is to search for:
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaba"
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaabb"
...
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaabz"
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaab,"
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaab."
Then search for
"aaaaaaaaaaaaa.....aaaaaaaaaaaaaaab"
And see if the second search turns up an exact match page in the first set. ;)
Coz I wonder if the guy is not just having a program make BS up on the fly, insert the search key in and then memorize the search key + salt/seed to make sure that repeated searches produce the same BS pages.
If he isn't, then yes I can see why he took 6 months to do it. Otherwise...
(Score: 3, Funny) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:27AM
I can do better than him: I can write you a software that gives you any possible text of the world by just entering its index. To save space, I decided to encode the index not as digit string, but as a sequence of Unicode UTF-8 characters. And for simplicity I decided to use the Unicode UTF-8 encoding of that text as index.
So basically, my program takes UTF-8 as input, and gives the same UTF-8 back. Voila, the infinite library.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:15AM
(Score: 2) by TK on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:51PM
How many pages are the rough equivalent of:
alas, poor yorick. i knew him, horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
So I have to search for the entire 3200 character string I'm looking for in order to find the one page that contains that exact combination. The character set is a-z, full stop (.), comma (,), and space ( ). 29 characters in all.
If I searched for pages of Hamlet that contain those two sentences, I would have to sort through 29^(3200-91) pages. to find the page that has the entire rest of text after it.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @05:30AM
Why, the infinite library is positively filthy. The smut is overpowering. Finding any useful information would be like finding a specific drop of cum in a pile of faggots. Ban it. All of it.
(Score: 2) by TK on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:57PM
There are definitely some pages that are exact matches of existing ASCII porn. Probably not any of the good stuff, since special characters aren't included, but enough to get you through your rough spot.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:49PM
Burn it down!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jasassin on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:01AM
Even the library containing all of the Brunnen G history was eventually destroyed.
There's even an episode where the last of some earth like civilization is saying what he has to say to the universe, before the Lexx plows him to smithereens in the middle of space. That simple two seconds of video made me laugh at how pitiful we really are on a cosmic scale.
If you've never seen Lexx, check it out. First two seasons are the best.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:47AM
Brunnen G? I always thought it was the Bruenen Gee. But point is well taken. And if I may add another equally or even more irrelevant Sci-Fi Show: one episode the Andromeda featured the "collectors", who seemed to be archiving everything that had happened in the past. The problem with veridical copies, however, is that once into them, they are reality? So we can only hope that the past remains dead, a dessicated corpse over which we theorize. Else, we go there and all vote for Marco Rubio! Noooooo!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:06AM
Slander, libel, hate speech, kiddy porn, state secrets...
This guys must be locked up and the key thrown away!
(Score: 3, Touché) by sigma on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:38AM
The location of the key is in there too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Thursday May 07 2015, @02:41PM
Along with infinite false locations....
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:09PM
Slander, libel, hate speech, kiddy porn, state secrets...
T'is but foolish childishness of no significance. The true evil lies buried within: COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT!!
Burn the witch! I mean, intellectual property MAURAUDERS!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Geotti on Thursday May 07 2015, @07:27AM
If this restriction were lifted
Why... Just put it in "the cloud" (tm) the space there is infinitely scalable! Oh, and btw, could someone find my thesis in there, so I don't have to write it?
By the way, what would the paradox be called if someone would actually, by accident, stumble over their thesis, the unfulfilled destiny paradox?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @02:44PM
So I guess now everything is copyright infringement since everything anyone can type or think of is already in there and we're just infringing on it. Even this post is infringement too. I hope I don't get sued. The good news is that everything Hollywood puts out is infringement and now they can be sued.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:12AM
Nice
(Score: 3, Interesting) by greenfruitsalad on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:41AM
this is similar to the infinite storage device in gnu/linux. There's a device called /dev/random and it contains everything ever created if you have the patience to read from it for long enough.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:57AM
if you have the patience to read from it for long enough.
Some times , .. . . . k .. . . the time spent . .. ;// exceeds . k. .. .. . time. .. . . . endMessage. Optimum Omega.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @09:05AM
That device is provided by the Linux kernel and therefore is independent of any GNU stuff. Therefore it is a device in Linux, not just in GNU/Linux.
(Score: 2) by kaganar on Thursday May 07 2015, @02:18PM
You may be wondering how the virtual Library of Babel can allow indexing and searching so efficiently where /dev/random does not. I'll be honest, I'm not sure exactly how the virtual library was implemented, but it seems probable that it works similar to the following:
Is it really a search engine? Well, yes, it did actually find some virtual pages in virtual books on virtual shelves in virtual rooms in the virtual library. :) It's just not a particularly useful search engine.
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Thursday May 07 2015, @08:56AM
I was going to mention that the library even contains a page with this article, but then I noticed that the books do not contain numbers, of which there are three in the article. Punctuation marks and formatting are, of course, out of the question, and the article has those as well.
Thus, the library's copy of this article is the following mangled version:
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:46PM
Click the "and so on" link in the summary.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Friday May 08 2015, @07:30AM
Not that I had noticed the "and so on" link, but the page I found did not contain any extraneous text, so it' better than the one in the link.
(Score: 3, Touché) by WizardFusion on Thursday May 07 2015, @09:11AM
Just wait until the MPAA hear of this, he'll be sued into oblivion for having copies of movie scripts.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:16AM
he has copy of nothing, just generate random stuff on the fly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @12:16PM
whoooooooooooooooooosh.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @02:58PM
You think that will stop the MPAA?
(Score: 2) by jimshatt on Thursday May 07 2015, @11:14AM
Even more trivial is to just use a transcendent number like Pi or SQR(2) and pick a random index from there. It contains everything (with arbitrary (but finite?) length).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @03:12PM
Transcendental numbers are not necessarily normal. Pi and the square root of two are not proven to be normal.
9.1101001000100001000001000000...
is transcendental but not normal for instance
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 07 2015, @03:30PM
Of course generating random text is simple.
The interesting accomplishment is that he made it searchable by using a reversible PRNG (effectively a form of (bad) encryption).
(Also, because I like deflating ego: sqrt(2) is not a transcendental number, transcendental numbers are not necessarily random, and not necessarily uniformly random)
(Score: 2, Interesting) by WillAdams on Thursday May 07 2015, @12:08PM
The Freefall webcomic looked at this in a strip --- described it as a ``collection of tweets'' each containing 6 unique words, and the total storage space needed for it was projected to be the size of a small moon.
Can't find the specific strip, but it's somewhere on: http://freefall.purrsia.com/ [purrsia.com] but I couldn't find it using the webcomic transcription at: http://www.ohnorobot.com [ohnorobot.com] (so obviously I must re-read Freefall and transcribe every panel into that)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Rivenaleem on Thursday May 07 2015, @01:12PM
The answer to the ultimate question of life the universe and everything was easy to find. It must be on one of the pages in the library. The tough part is knowing what the correct page is, and more importantly, given how "42" will be on billions of pages, and for it to be the answer, it would be the last 2 characters of the page, you would have to find a computer that could correctly identify what all the correct letters leading up to that are. It makes sense that it would require a vastly more powerful computer to work out the question than the answer.
(Score: 2) by The Archon V2.0 on Thursday May 07 2015, @03:03PM
... and I found the Denny's Kids Menu: http://brunching.com/randommonkeys.html [brunching.com]
(Score: 1) by OrugTor on Thursday May 07 2015, @04:57PM
There exists a number N where
"almost infinite" > infinite - N
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @08:59AM
It's only infinitesimally smaller than infinity.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Thursday May 07 2015, @05:22PM
In related news, let me present you the π-compression algorithm: it compresses data by indexing it in π, which can be recomputed at arbitrary precision to retrieve the data.
Only minor problem, the index is orders of magnitude bigger than the data. Anyway it makes as much sense as the topic.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Thursday May 07 2015, @05:42PM
A Library at it's core is a repository for Information that can be used, but is not sold. What good is a book of actual gibberish? While this is an interesting exercise, it's a fairly useless resource.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:53PM
Of course you lose copies of most tweets and comments posted on the internet.
(Score: 1) by gishzida on Thursday May 07 2015, @05:57PM
Because that is how useless this is.
A more useful version of such a "library" would use a dictionary and Markov chains to generate more useful pages
As an example see http://markovswisdom.blogspot.com/ [blogspot.com] for some examples of this kind of random generation
(Score: 1) by sharkx on Thursday May 07 2015, @06:41PM
Is there some reason this could not be copyrighted? If so, then there can be a claim on any future work. This also describes all future patents as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 08 2015, @04:10AM
So every possible Name of God must be written in those books.
Hey! Aren't those the stars starting to wink out?
(Score: 1) by dingus on Saturday May 09 2015, @07:23PM
http://smbc-comics.com/index.php?id=2787 [smbc-comics.com]